If it’s not terrorism, forget about it

Last Tuesday, a man with a hammer reportedly yelled “This is for Syria” and attacked a police officer at Notre Dame cathedral in Paris.

French police shot the assailant, and nobody died. During the day, CNN led the story with big, important-looking “Breaking News” graphics. That night, the incident in Paris led the evening news all over the country. Newspapers worldwide were all over the story.

The day before the hammer incident, a disgruntled former employee — armed with a handgun, a large hunting knife and some smaller knives — walked into a business in Orlando and opened fire.

When the slaughter ended, John Robert Neumann Jr. had killed five people, then took his own life. The next day, the story was inside many newspapers, and quickly forgotten.

I figure there are two reasons for all of this.

First, we have become numb to mass shootings. They happen with such regularity that our eyes glaze over. Five years ago, the Orlando tragedy would have been huge news for days. Not now.

The other reason the Orlando shooting didn’t get much play? It wasn’t terror-related. It wasn’t perpetrated by a Muslim. And the Paris hammer incident had enough terror elements to raise a lot of red flags.

Terrorism sells these days. It’s a lot sexier than anything involving a disgruntled former employee with a gun.

Taking hellacious gun incidents for granted is dangerous. When five deaths in a shooting becomes a yawner hardly worth mentioning, we are very close to losing the battle against gun violence.

Our esteemed President Trump, who is very much in bed with the National Rifle Association, didn’t even bother to tweet his sympathy or revulsion of the Orlando incident. You can bet it would have been an epic tweetstorm if a Muslim was involved.

Trump, however, did tweet after the London terror attack last weekend, and pushed a pro-gun agenda.

“Do you notice we are not having a gun debate right now?,” the tweeter-in-chief sarcastically wrote. “That’s because they used knives and a truck!”

Of course, if guns had been used, the carnage might have been 10 times worse, but Trump ignores that fact.

Our esteemed Gov. Rick Scott, who considers Trump to be a brother from a different mother, did send a message after the Orlando incident.

“I ask all Floridians,” he statement read, “to pray for the families impacted by this senseless act of violence.”

Sorry, guv, but prayer only goes so far. Doing something about requiring deeper background checks and working to make sure people who shouldn’t have guns don’t get them would mean a lot more. But you won’t get that from our gun-loving governor. Not when he’ll need the pro-gun vote if he runs for the Senate next year, as expected.

So we won’t do a thing about guns, as the numbers continue to get more damning.

More than 33,000 people die in gun violence in America every year. There have been over 6,500 deaths due to gun violence this year, not including suicides (there are about 22,000 gun-related suicides yearly).

But a possible terrorist with a hammer thousands of miles away gets more public attention than a mass murder in Orlando.

Quite simply, we are numb to mass killings and take them for granted unless a terrorist is involved. We almost accept them as normal. And that is the most dangerous thing of all.